Author: Sirpa Kähkönen

In this series, Finnish authors ponder the difficulties of their profession. Sirpa Kähkönen, author of six novels, gives an account of going unseen – the painful initiation, triggered by the lukewarm reception of one of her books, of a more mature and profound phase in her life as a creative writer

I found myself in a temporary but intense period of creative crisis in the spring of 2006. The crisis was expressed outwardly in the classic manner – as an emptiness, a desertification. Suddenly I was unable to get to the place between dream and reality where an artist operates. Something was missing from my writing; the spark, the vibration, the lifeblood. More…

The clothesline swayed in the wind. Helvi closed her eyes and felt herself flutter into the air with the laundry. She flapped her white linen wings, straining higher, now seeing below the whole small peninsula city, its damp rooftops glittering in the morning sun, the blue sighs of the chimneys, the steamboats toiling on the lake and the trains chugging on their tracks. The whole of heaven was clear and blue; only far off in the east were there white pillars roiling – whether smoke or clouds, Helvi could not tell.

She flew north on her linen wings and saw the great bridges leading to the city, on whose flanks the hidden anti-aircraft batteries gasped the fumes of gun oil and iron, and continued her journey over the land, following the straight lines of the telephone wires. She flew over wooded hills and deep green fields, finally arriving on the slope of the great hill where her daughter now lived, in hiding from the war. More…

About the author

Sirpa Kähkönen (born 1964) is a translator and novelist whose sixth book, Lakanasiivet (‘Linen wings’, Otava, 2007), was one of the six runners-up for the Finlandia Prize for Fiction; it was also performed as a play at the City Theatre in Kuopio in 2009. The latest book in her series of novels, set in Kuopio in the early 1940s, is entitled Hietakehto (‘Sand cradle’, 2012).